We realise that gold means only one thing to most people at the moment (and believe you me Chemistry World towers has been as gripped by the Olympics as everyone else) but we also need to congratulate the University of Edinburgh’s school of chemistry for getting a gold Athena SWAN Charter award. That’s the UK’s top accolade for good practice in recruiting, retaining and promoting women in science, engineering, technology, maths and medicine in higher education. Only two departments in the country have been judged to be gold standard: Edinburgh’s chemistry department and the University of York’s chemistry department (yay chemistry, etc).

Is there a place I can ask your team questions? If not disregard this message, I’ll state my question here and would be grateful for forwarding or at the least a reply of some kind… 50 degrees celsius cup of water freezes faster than 40 degrees celsius… Is this only true of water or do other liquids do this too? Also considering the states of ice and water the intermolecular distances of ice are larger than that of water… Perhaps the warmer water has interatomic distances closer to that of ices? There disregarding a need for molecular redistribution? This is not even half an explanation but yeah any thoughts??

Hi Lee,
This isn’t really the place, but I’ll answer anyway! The phenomenon you’re describing is called the Mpemba effect, after the Tanzanian school student who brought it back to attention in the 1960s. There isn’t really a satisfactory and well-accepted explanation, so yours might well be right (or at least partly so). In fact the RSC is currently running a competition for explanations of the effect – maybe you could put yours together into an entry http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2012/mpemba-effect-water-ice-hot.asp